Why one of The Pirate Bay’s cofounders hopes the site stays dead

There were a lot of sad pirates on Tuesday after a massive police raid completely shut down the infamous Pirate Bay torrent website worldwide. However, TorrentFreak reports that Pirate Bay cofounder and former spokesman Peter Sunde now believes that the site should stay down with Davy Jones’ locker this time and permanently die off.

“The Pirate Bay has been raided, again,” Sunde recently wrote. “That happened over 8 years ago last time. That time, a lot of people went out to protest and rally in the streets. Today few seem to care. And I’m one of them. […] The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old designs. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads were filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful, they somehow ended up even worse.”

So it’s not so much that Sunde has had a change of heart about piracy, it’s more that The Pirate Bay sold out in its quest to make money from facilitating the theft of intellectual property. Sunde thinks there are plenty of other torrent sites out there that are far superior and that offer a better user experience.

That still likely won’t stop many would-be pirates from feeling sad if The Pirate Bay really has walked the plank for the final time, however.